Modern Voyage of Discovery
Heritage in itself is a voyage of discovery.
We are celebrating this month Indian Heritage Month.
The modern wave of migration that brought a stream of laborers from India to the Western Hemisphere is one such voyage of discovery, of daring.
When we celebrate our arrival, we celebrate the bravery of crossing over to the unknown.
We celebrate the spirit of triumph over adversity.
Celebrating Pioneers & Founders
We celebrate the founders and the builders of the society.
The journey to reclaiming his place in the world for migrant Indians and his descendants became from the time he begins to bond with other immigrants on the ship and sing the first line of from the Ramayan on the treacherous seas.
That line is picked up by the man sitting next to him and the woman next to that man and the child on the woman’s lap.
In these elements of internalized culture and tradition that are part of the cargo of those immigrant ships, borne thousands of miles across the oceans and deposited in a new place.
They seed and take root.
Imagine what it might have been in the beginning when our ancestors set foot on these shores.
Recap the Origins
In the beginning, it would have begun with one time expired Indian.
From nearby trees, he cuts branches to build a one room hut, with branches for his thatched roof.
And bamboo and grass pasted over with mud packed and hardened to form the walls of his home.
Its floors, he leepays with his hands using Cow dung and water mixed into a paste. It is cool to the touch of his feet and helps keep the insects away.
Home Centre of Culture
Home is the axis of his track to and from the fields his bear calloused feet hardened, his skin peeling white and dried, stamped down, towering grasses.
To reveal a part way that would one day become a roadway that may even carry his name Sooknanan, Ramlogan, Sukhu, Banwari or Ramai trace. A road is named.
With time, others acquire similar plots, set up huts, and plant the fields next to him, he takes one as his wife. With others around them, they grow families. A village is born.
They create an outdoor shrine under a Mango or Peepal tree.
The shrine becomes the place where they teach the young, the ancestry, language, religion, culture, beliefs and practices.
It becomes their meeting place not only to pray, but they exchange ideas.
Birth of multicultural Communities
They espouse philosophies about existence, the world religion, the day in the fields, the weather problems of survival, plans for their future, their place in this new place.
It becomes the center of social transformation. A community takes root.
They meet with other groups at each other’s shrines and the discussions broaden as they recognize common interests and common concerns. They develop networks, first to sing Ramayan and Bhajans in villages in which such groups do not exist.
They share instruments and music and musicians.
From Community to National Festivals
Then they teach others Ramayan singing, recitation, dance and language, and to discuss social and political concerns. Nationalism blossoms.
They organize cultural competitions and contests like Chowtal singing competitions around Holi Time and Jhal Ramayan competitions around Divali Time and Ramleela.
Singers and dancers and musicians of one village try to outdo the other.
Struggle for Recognition
These and other events will evolve in the district and then one day national festivals Ramleela and Divali and Holi.
Navel Strings Buried
Religion, culture and community, combine in a powerful catalyst to demand reform of social conditions and for political recognition of their contribution to the place, not as temporary contract workers, but as citizens who have peopled this earth and this sea and this sky with their gods and goddesses.
Whose navel strings are buried in this land and who have buried the navel strings of their children on sacred spots on landing of water with tears and nourish with sweat and sustained with humiliation and pain and degradation.
Who have as planted in this land their faith and hopes and dreams, loftily fluttering like colorful jhandis in the wind.
The process I outlined of society formation there is part has been part of my studies in Finding A Place and subsequently expanded and documented too in The LEarning Revolution – Multiple Choice in a Multicultural Place.
It gathers together information about our role in forming a society that is generally erased in discussion and in the written and educational forms of documentation of the culture.
Distorted and Misinterpreted History & Heritage
For instance, I see, you, the Arya Samaj movement celebrating what you call your 70th anniversary in education.
But those 70 years only mark the beginning of registering your formal institution and given emphasis to the date of formal registration and recognition and acknowledgement from the colonial processes we are in, we are in effect using the history of struggle, an endeavour that predates all of that.
All that that came before the point of registration.
It erases the pioneering effort the charity is the freely given of time and energy.of men and women in the communities.to keep a culture alive.
It erases what we call oral cultural processes.
The informal processes of passing knowledge from one generation to the next.
And it also discounts the value of that traditional heritage of passing knowledge of transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next.
And so it also erases from our history books and our heritage to roots and value of the essence of our cultures.
This has been the focus of my studies.
It changes radically the picture of our place in development.
It changes our understanding and appreciation of each other and of other groups in the society and their understanding of us, and this has been the work in Finding a Place.
When we take into consideration the oral, undocumented andin tangible forms of knowledge transmission that will be passed on knowledge from one generation to the next.
So in Finding a Place, while mapping the history and heritage from written sources, some very really and little known newspapers and magazines.
I also incorporated and traced how the early settlers applied and utilized the culture in their memory before they access the knowledge, the songs and dances and rituals and practices and habits and beliefs to establish themselves and settle in the society as described earlier.
So what you would see here are some of the materials I encountered in research in the images you see here.
For example, the Arya Samaj Movement in Trinidad and Tobago recognizes its origins in 1910 with the arrival of the first Arya missionaries, as Pundit Baidi Permanand as I pointed out earlier, with the registering of its official organization in the 1940s.
Research deepens broadens History
But Finding a Place takes this back much earlier with actions that were occurring, unrecognized and undocumented at community level.
Because at that time our communities were very much invisible from the mainstream.
And this is manifested in the documentation that came later, as in the little-known newspapers and literary magazines, for example in the in the representation description of the visit of the Vedic missionary Pandia which your history would tell you.
In setting the stage for formalizing education and community outreach among your groups.
What is exciting and interesting to see with the way all groups, religions and races participated in each others activities and worked together to strengthened the movement towards Independence.
We are seeing this been eroded since independence and of course, we know what caused that erosion, the politics and the scramble for constituency.
It shows this In Finding a Place that not only among Hindus, but also all Muslims and other groups the rich intercultural exchange and fermentation that was occurring in villages.
This is being wiped out by the tellings and misinterpretations of our history and culture.
And continue to be repeated and replicated in the documented forms.
How well do we know our history?
How well do you know your history?
You’ve seen from all this evidence I’m showing you about the early Arya Samaj March movement, and I’ve done the same for the Presbyterians and Muslims as well of what was happening in the villages within among these groups and our communities.
If we do not know our history, how can you teach it?
Intercultural Development
In the same way it traces the process of intercultural development, the interactions of different denominations, the way Christians, Muslim, Hindus and others worked together to build a society.
So there is also, the evidence from the Christians, Presbyterians, Muslims, other Hindu groups treated in Finding A Place.
I applied this knowledge to analyzing the political environment when I was working on Through the Political Glass Ceiling mapping the part to political office of the first woman Prime Minister of the picture that surfaces became very different to what we have been conditioned to believe about our Westminster adopted political system, the two-party system.
Because we feel that the needs and the wants and what needs to be done and what has to be done is sometimes overwhelming, we end up falling back into taking and borrowing and applying these misfit forms, misfit information that doesn’t resound with the cultural relevance that we need for education of our children.
Urgent needs
So what do we need to do?
It means investing in resources, using our same resources, but you need directed more wisely to build capacity, to develop infrastructure.
And this development should begin from preschool.
Tech Savvy Children
Our children are already tech-savvy by the age of four, so why are we waiting until age 14 to introduce them to IT? They are navigating social media by ages 3-4 and five so why are we not integrating social media skills into their education?
An this is where I’m making a link between what’s happening in the informal environment and what’s happening in the formal environment, the formal environment, formal education environment is very slow and sluggish in keeping-up just as it was in terms of acknowledging and recognizing what was happening in our communities and villages in the informal system, we see the sluggishness also in terms of general education progress.
Sensitive Digitisation
We have this to retrieve the knowledge and information through research and digitize.
And it places us way behind the digital age.
And as we panic, what are we doing?
We are now copycatting wholesale, transferring all the prejudices and biases that come with media, ingrained, internalized in how media present information and educational material developed for and from other society.
We face the danger of going into the digital age with this deficit and imbalance in knowledge.
Knowledge systems and our culture and our heritage, unless we retrieve and actively participate, we will not just lose ground, we will lose valuable information and what we are losing is that link that will enable us to connect our present and our past in the same way we have lost the link, with colonization and utilizing interpretations of ourselves and our history and the history of our culture,
We are now further distancing ourselves from understanding and retrieving the knowledge.
So what can we do?
Research, publication, teacher training, utilizing youth for peer-development?
I have been doing in the background some of that work.
Finding a Place is now in the process of being digitized and a digitized form of Finding A Place is not a PDF.
It will bring to life through visualisation, audio, images the Society I painted in my in when I started my presentation.
So digitization is not just turning things into PDF when we talk about making it culturally relevant for intercultural education.
Removing Biases & Prejudices
It is ensuring that the images that are represented are properly presented, they do not reflect, they do not contain biases and prejudices that are transmitted, unknown to us, to the people that we teach.
So some of these experiments I would give you pretty close, so yes, digitization of Finding a Place and the finalization of the digitization of Multiple Choice which is of the post independent period in the communities and what was happening in there for release and for use by educators.
Secondly, I have been also developing a new learning framework that we would engage with and amalgamate and integrate our approach to the Arts and Sciences.
We have tended to adopt that colonial model in which the sciences the arts are separated and in separating the sciences and the arts.
New Culturally Relevant Learning Framework
Of course you also distance the oral culture and that learning so in my National Geographic, capstone I have begun to develop a new label learning framework that can amalgamate the science and the arts, science and arts education and bring out that would be relevant for intercultural education, and this is based on examination
It’s a blended learning model that integrates how National Geographic does its scientific education and how UNESCO does its cultural education.
So I am amalgamating these into what I call Story Science.
New forms of engagement MultiMedia micro Epic
Another element is what I launched at Commonwealth Day at the height of COVID.
A new literary genre called Multimedia Micro Epic where I take the classical epic and adapt it for social media short form for digital media, sowhere as we think that digital education, we’ve been dumb and down and throwing at children a set of boring PDFs with ridiculous mascots and in PowerPoint presentations I created the Multimedia Micro Epic as a form to amalgamate all the very complex elements of the classical epic for social media.
I wish you happy reflections on this day and look forward to working together to forge a part way forward.
I thank you.
See Youtube for full presentation
(Address to Arya Prathinidhi Sabha Indian Arrival Day Celebrations May 28, 2023)
About Dr Kris Rampersad
Dr Rampersad is a certified UNESCO Heritage and National Geographic Educator, Global Woman Tech Makers’ Ambassador, Google and Worldpulse Digital Skills Ambassador, and Island Innovators’ Ambassador.
She was awarded the Trinidad and Tobago National Medal Gold for contributions to the development of women and journalism and is recognised as a pioneer in development policy blogging for new media by the UNESCO/BBC & Partners’ Communication’s Initiative, among other accolades.
First PhD
She was the first sitting journalist/editor in the Caribbean and first in her family to complete a PhD. She holds PhD in Humanities, encompassing developmental studies of post-colonial societies with a diploma in Mass Communications from the Jawaharlal University/Indian Institute of Mass Communications. She is a Fellow of Foreign Press Centre of Japan, University of Cambridge and a Commonwealth Professional Fellow.
Tracking Migration, Displacement
Her dissertation tracks the migration, settlement, adaptation and processes of society-formation. It has since published as Finding a Place which is considered groundbreaking in international contexts of tracing identity-retrieval from distorted colonial knowledge systems. It is now being redeveloped for multimedia as are other elements of the educational research and she is inviting investments for this initiative. Contact her to discuss how you can get involved.
Dr Rampersad is also the author of the highly acclaimed LiTTscapes – Landscapes of Fiction, a springboard for engaging all ages – she says from ages 3 to 103 in literature and cultural appreciation beyond the textbooks through live events and tours aimed at cultivating heritage appreciation and to develop Caribbean Literary & Heritage Tourism.
She authored Through the Political Glass Ceiling that captures the ascension to office of the First Woman Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago and I the Sky & Me the Sea – The Adventures of Munnie Butterfly and Danny Dragonfly, the first of a Caribbean EcoCultural Adventure Fable Series.
Reengineering Education in the Digital Age
Now focusing in reshaping education for the digital age, she pioneered the newest creative genre, the MultiMedia MicroEpic during the Pandemic lockdown. It adapts the long form classical epic for short form new media.
Dr Rampersad has long experience in multilateral relations and served as President of the UNESCO Education Commission, as an Independent Member of the UNESCO InterGovernmental Committee on Intangible Cultural Heritage. She was the first UNESCO ICH educator/facilitator for the English speaking Caribbean and was actively involved in local to international stakeholder engagement processes that significantly augmented the Caribbean presence on UNESCO Lists – World Heritage sites for Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, Reggae on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Registry, and enlisting of Port of Spain, Nassau, Kingston as UNESCO Creative Cities.
She has trained, guided, mentored and worked with many of the diverse cultural communities of the Caribbean from indigeneous peoples to the more recent migrant communities, devising innovative user-responsive mechanisms for communicating culture-centred development for Latin America and the Caribbean, Small Islands, the Global South and the Developing World.
Find out more at Website www.krisrampersad.com. LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter @kisramp